1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a character input or character selection method and a device implementing the method. More particularly, the invention relates to an electronic device having a character input interface, to a method for selecting characters, and to a character input module.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a conventional mobile phone (as shown in FIG. 9), or other sorts of handheld devices such as PDA, is not allowed to be equipped with as many keys as possible due to size limitations. Therefore, using a single key to enter two or more categories of characters, e.g. Chinese ZhuYin characters (phonetic spelling of Chinese characters), numeric characters (numbers), Roman alphabetic characters (letters) or special symbols, is very common for such devices. Moreover, each character system contains two or more characters or symbols. As such, to switch among all the character input modes, e.g. number, ZhuYin and alphabetic input modes, the user needs to perform additional key-pressing operation for switching to another input mode or selecting desired characters.
For example, when the user wants to enter a character string that reads baby (meaning “my baby is five years old this year” in English), the user needs to go through the following steps: selecting the ZhuYin input mode first to enter the Chinese characters  (my); switching to the lower case alphabetic input mode to enter the English word “baby”; switching back to the ZhuYin input mode to enter the Chinese characters  (this year); switching to the number input mode to enter the number “5”; and switching to the ZhuYin input mode again to enter the Chinese character  (years old). This process of inputting a character string requires 5 input mode switches, and each input switch requires the user to press keys for 3 to 5 times. Thus, conventional operating processes of inputting or selecting characters are indirect and complicated, making the usage of such devices low efficient.
Furthermore, the user cannot enter a character of different category continuously with the same key when using a prior art device; rather, he or she is required to first select a different character input mode before pressing that key to input characters. Also, to select one out of many characters using a prior art device, the user needs to press the same key plural times before seeing the desired character show up on the display. However, the keys on which plural categories of characters are shown are generally of a quite small size. It is difficult for the user to see how many presses it takes for the desired character to show up.
Therefore, it has been an objective for keypad designers to provide users with a fast, simple, and intuitive method for selecting or inputting characters.